The big news on the transit front in Washington Thursday morning was that Metro officials have prepared a report that outlines $26 billion in projects over the next three decades, including new Metro rail tunnels and lines in downtown D.C., underground walkways connecting busy stations and extensions of existing lines deeper into suburbs and exurbs — along with longer trains and better maintenance.

We talked to David Alpert, the editor of popular urbanism and transport site Greater Greater Washington, about the plan for the nation’s second busiest subway system.

WSJ: Was there anything that caught you by surprise?

WMATA

The WMATA provided rough guides to where the new river crossings would be, as well as new lines running east-west and north-south in central Washington. At top, the current Metro map; at bottom, the image provided in the report Thursday.

Alpert: Nothing that was completely out of the blue. One thing that was more surprising was the way that there was a lot of analysis that Metro has been doing as part of a regional transit planning initiative and they were going to weigh a number of ways to deal with things like core capacity through the center of D.C. or the Yellow Line going through a new tunnel on 11th street downtown, or have trains go east to Union Station through the capital riverfront area. But the strategic plan gives some broad approaches … but without a lot of detail on why and on what exactly those alternatives would be.

The plan also doesn’t really talk about Union Station. It’s a big choke point for the system. A lot people get off commuter rail at Union Station. They can only transfer to the Red Line because it’s the only line there, and so a lot of the proposals had been to send some other lines to Union Station. And despite this being a fairly expensive and significant plan it doesn’t really address at all what to do about Union Station. So I guess I would say it’s not so much that there are any things in the plan that are a complete surprise, but perhaps what was unexpected to me was the things that it doesn’t necessarily address.

WSJ: This plan looks out over many decades. Is the feeling that things really have to get started now for any of this to exist 20 or 30 years from now?

Alpert: Absolutely, if anything, things should have gotten started quite a long time ago. It takes a long time to plan, fund, build consensus for major transportation projects. Doing something about Metro is a definite need. We’ve already seen with the Rush Plus changes which have increased crowding on the Blue Line, and when the Silver Line comes online, the crowding for a lot of Virginians will get even worse.

Metro absolutely needs to increase its capacity just to keep from completely bursting at the seams, if it’s not already. It absolutely needs to go to more eight-car trains. The original designers of Metro had anticipated we would be at all eight-car trains well before today, but the region and the federal government were never really willing to invest in that. We’re a little bit behind that eight-ball on things like eight-car trains as well as starting to line up consensus and funding for some of the more expensive core-capacity changes like separate tunnels through the core.

WSJ: This plan seems to relieve existing bottlenecks by building connectors between nearby busy stations, but building rail lines fairly parallel to existing lines as well as adding stations perhaps in Georgetown, the West End, Logan Circle. But it doesn’t expand service to broader central D.C. Is that where things like streetcars come into play? It’s a cost issue essentially, right?

Alpert: Building new heavy rail, new Metro lines is very expensive. In the ’60s and ’70s, when we were building the Metro system, there was much more willingness in our nation to invest in big ambitious transportation projects. Today, that’s really very difficult. And so Metro unfortunately is forced mainly to focus on making its system more efficient and leave a lot of the expansion of transit to new areas, to the more cost effective modes like the streetcar.

On the other hand, it is very worthwhile for Metro to deal with its bottlenecks. We are expanding Metro to a new area right now, with the Silver Line. It’s hitting one the probably most important outward expansion in the region, because its going to reach Tysons Corner, which is the largest edge city in the nation and one of the largest office markets in the nation and an incredibly important economic center. But you could really argue that something about core capacity ideally would have been part of the original Silver Line proposal. The Silver Line will add a lot of riders at one end of the system without adding room for them in the middle, and so it will get more congested going through Rosslyn where the lines come together and Virginians will be finding very crowded trains and not enough trains. If we grow the core, then it would certainly be feasible to extending some lines to other areas.

The WMATA report suggested directions for expansion.

One of the charts on the plan has some arrows pointing in directions of additional added capacity. [See map at right.] One possibly very important direction for extra capacity would be to extend the Yellow Line down Route 1 to serve the Richmond Highway area [south of Washington] and get to Fort Belvoir where there are lots of jobs. But it’s not something we can really contemplate doing if there’s not going to be a core capacity increase.

WSJ: I can see a scenario where the Silver Line proves to be very popular and then all of a sudden you have this incredible bottleneck in Rosslyn and people say, hey, we really to improve the core quickly. Is this in preparation for that?

Alpert: Sometimes transportation projects might not move for a long time and then move more quickly when the need is there, if the political dynamics are there, if funding is there. Right now it seems like a little bit of a pipe dream. You are looking at Virginia, and the fact that the state is already underfunding the Silver Line it is already building. There isn’t the political will in Richmond to do anything about transportation that would even remotely help solve the problem. But that could change one day, and that might be only in the span of a few years that it would change.

For that reason, it’s very important to have plans on the table for what to do. There’s a couple thing that should be farther along that the report alludes to but that Metro isn’t necessarily going to take the lead on. One is, there are already plans for the Purple Line [light rail] in Maryland. That needs to get built. What about extending the Purple Line to Tysons in some way. There should be a plan for that that’s ready to go and shovel ready so that one day, if the political dynamic is such that people are interested in funding it, it is something that can be funded and built without a huge amount of delay.

Likewise, the Metro report also alludes to but doesn’t go into a lot of detail about the MARC and VRE [commuter trains]. MARC riders come in from a lot of parts of Maryland and might want to go to lines that aren’t the Red Line and the train could keep going – there’s a track through Union Station to L’Enfant Plaza where all four other lines [Yellow, Blue, Green, Orange] are located. And then that train goes to Crystal City and King Street in Alexandria where there are lots of jobs. That would be really great to allow MARC riders to make that connection. But there are a lot of specific very technical operational issues to work out to make that happen.

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